“IF time is money, then sleep is theft. Today’s cult of busyness regards sleep as a defect that threatens to render people competitively unfit.”
“enthusiasm for sleeplessness seems to make an executive virtue out of a capitalistic necessity”
“In the wake of Enlightenment and in tandem with the emergence of capitalism, humans began to view nature as a pool of resources to be tamed, mastered, owned, and directed toward fulfilling human desires. It wasn’t long before this conquest of nature was redirected toward the intransigencies of human nature.”
“The attempt to tame the body of its unprofitable tendency to tire began as an effort to make “saving time” a moral issue. Sixteenth-century moralist and mercantilist discourses already regarded punctuality as a prerequisite for the conception of a modern man, the pinnacle of social development in an imagined context of linear progress.”
“British historian E.P. Thompson points out in “Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism” that toward the end of the 17th century, as wage labor relations began to become more prevalent, time began to be conceived as a precious commodity to be spent rather than merely passed. “Those who are employed experience a distinction between their employer’s time and their ‘own’ time,” Thompson notes. “And the employer must use the time of his labor, and see that it is not wasted.” Tolling bells and fines levied by employers taught students and workers that their time was being counted, that it was a regulated and regimented currency.”
“In 17th century Britain, clocks restructured work habits by materializing the ethic of time thrift, setting a clear demarcation between “work” and “life” and reminding workers of their tasks. The omnipresence of clocks was a guarantor of regulation, it ensured the institution of order in the workspace. The clock’s ubiquity legitimized time discipline and naturalized it, making it banal and commonsensical. It made sure that no one escaped the tempo.”
“As anthropologist Bruno Latour has argued, technology and things are not simply animated by humans but also mediate human action.”
“The incessant sound of the ticking clock, the mounting anxiety it almost automatically evokes, has come to regulate the body and embed it within the culture of busyness.”
“By making sure everyone maximizes their efficiency, clocks address the physical limitations of the human body, becoming a kind of prosthesis that pushes humans closer to reaching an “optimal” state of activity.”
“This mechanization of the body—a precursor and template for the ongoing reconceptualization of the self in terms of quantities alone—reflects how our bodies have become products, rather than agents, of a culture of busyness and rationality that glorifies productivity.”
“we’ve been clocked in and can no longer clock out.”